Brawler, Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff's nine-story collection is upsetting, uneven, and veers off in unexpected directions. If the stories have a shared theme, it is how the bedrock of family crumbles and its members are forced to shift into new formations. They repeatedly return to the covert textures of women's inner lives. A throughline of feminism runs through the collection, from the title story about an unruly teen diver with a dying mother to quieter tales of young women navigating absent or emotionally remote parents. My favorite section was Groff appending an author's note providing a kernel of personal motive behind each story, giving the collection an intimate second layer. The stories are not a single theme but a shared mood… a painful yearning and a sense of hidden guilt.  Each of the nine stories contains enough character and intrigue to sustain a full novel, though the compression to a short fiction collection is fine for my tastes.